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Black Chattelization Wars

Enslaved child in Zanzibar, c. 1890. The child is chained to the heavy piece of lumber to restict her movement.

Europeans scramble to get a piece of the resources of Afrika.

The Black Chattelization Wars refer to the long series of aggressions forced on Afrikan Peoples initiated by different groups of Arabs and Europeans. From the fall of Roman controled KMT, through the subsequent foreign invasions, on to the European theatres of the war, many times, dehumanization and chattelization went hand in hand with these military conflicts. Throughout these wars, it's estimated that hundreds of millions of Afrikans were killed, and equally, hundreds of millions were enslaved.

Terminology

Chinweizu

Henry Louis Gates

The term Black Chattelization Wars was coined by Pan-Africanist scholar Chinweizu in an article he wrote in response to Henry Louis Gates's article, Ending the Slavery Blame-Game. Gates argues that, in regards to the global enslavement of Afrikan people, the culpability of Afrikans is usually ignored, placing most of the blame squarely in the hands of European people. In his article, he states that in analysis of the history of Enslavement,

“

"Afrikans the significant role that Africans played in the trade, choosing to believe the romanticized version that our ancestors were all kidnapped unawares by evil white men, like Kunta Kinte was in “Roots.” The truth, however, is much more complex, slavery was a business, highly organized and lucrative for European buyers and African sellers alike."

”

Chinweizu argues in his article, What Slave Trade?, that essentially in every conflict, there have been those who helped aggressors to conquer the lands of their peoples. He also cites the trade of people in modern times, as well Chinese people in the 19th century, known to Europeans as "coolies" at the time

“

"Those who would put the blame/moral onus on Africans for the "slave trade" should be reminded of how the Europeans procured "coolies" from China in the 19th century, right after they had, with deafening moral self-congratulation, given up the African "slave trade". And they should also take a look at how human trafficking is being organized today from various parts of the world to Europe and the USA. Who organizes the demand? Who recruits the local gangsters to organize the supply? Who organizes the transportation to Europe and the USA? The European Bourgeois leopard has not changed his spots. If you want to truly see how he did it before in Africa, look at how he does it now elsewhere, and at how he did it in China in the 19th century. These same European criminals attempted to inflict on China what they would have ended up calling "the coolie trade", had Chinese resistance not stopped them.

”

Another example he cites are Jewish men and women who collaborated with the Nazis. The Jüdische Ordnungsdienst, as the Jewish police in the ghettos were called, furnished thousands of men for seizure operations. In the Warsaw ghetto alone the Jewish police numbered approximately 2500; in Lodz they were about 1200 men strong; the Lvov ghetto had an Ordnungsdienst of 500 men; and so on." [1]

Chinweizu ends his article saying

“

"The fact that thousands of Jews, probably tens of thousands, including community collaborated with the Nazi extermination machine, has not led to claims that the Nazis did not have total culpability for the horrors they set in motion and profited from, and that therefore Germany should be excused the payment of reparations to Israel. Why then should the fact that Black Africans collaborated in supplying black captives to European and American enslavers become grounds for diminishing or even abolishing the responsibility of the European Governments, European slave merchants and American planters for the Trans-Atlantic enslavement of Africans."

”

The term Black Chattelizaton Wars more fully encompasses what the the age of enslavement suffered by Black people.

Arab Theatre (680ce - Present)

Arabo-Afrikan Chattelization Wars

Part of Black Chattelization Wars

A slave auction was held near this location in Zanzibar for many years. This is an image of a sculpture, Memory for the Slaves by Clara Sörnäs, concrete, 1998.

Africa was opened up to Arab traders shortly after Arab warriors were able to capture north East Afrika from the Romans, who had been ruling for over 600 years. In a very short period, in the Muslim armies swept over present day Egypt and Libya, and were able to secure bases from which they would be able to take over the rest of the continent. By 711 AD North Afrika was effectively under the control of Arabs. At the same time, Arabs were going south and warring with Afrikans in Eastern, Central and Southern Afrika.

Modern Arabo-Afrikan wars

The Arab wars of Afrikan Chattelization have continued well into the 21th Century. Chattelization, and Afrikan genocide is openely practiced in places like Sudan and Mauritania.

Use of Islam in the war

Afrikan people were obtained through conquest, tribute from vassal states (in the first such treaty, Nubia was required to provide hundreds of male and females to be enslaved), offspring (children of slaves were also slaves, but since many slaves were castrated this was not as common), and purchase. The latter method provided the majority of slaves, and at the borders of the Islamic Empire vast number of new slaves were castrated ready for sale (Islamic law did not allow mutilation of slaves, so it was done before they crossed the border).

Afrikans were transported to the Islamic empire across the Sahara to Morocco and Tunisia from West Afrika, from Chad to Libya, along the Nile from East Afrika, and up the coast of East Afrika to the Persian Gulf. This trade had been well entrenched for over 600 years before Europeans arrived, and had driven the rapid expansion of Islam across North Africa.

European Theatre

The European Theatre of Chattelization Wars took place across the Afrikan continent from the 1400's through to the 1800's. The vast majority of Afrikans transported to the New World were captured from the central and western parts of the continent. The numbers were so great that Africans who came by way of the European slave trade became the most numerous Old-World immigrants in both North and South America before the late eighteenth century.[2] The South Atlantic economic system centered on making goods and clothing to sell in Europe and increasing the numbers of enslaved Afrikans brought to the New World. This system was crucial to European countries which, in the late 1300's were on the verge of collapsing under the weight of Islamic wars and plagues.

Early

The Portuguese were the first to engage in the European slave trade, and others soon followed. Afrikans were considered chattel cargo by the ship owners, to be transported to the Americas as quickly and cheaply as possible,[3] there to be sold to labor in coffee, tobacco, cocoa, cotton and sugar plantations, gold and silver mines, rice fields, construction industry, cutting timber for ships, and as house servants.

The European traders, ordered by trade volume, were: the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Spanish, the Dutch, and the Americans. Current estimates are that more than 80 million were captured 1/3 of whichsurviving to be shipped across the Atlantic,[4] although the actual number purchased by the traders is considerably higher.[5][6][7]

Post-Berlin Conference

The Berlin Conference was a meeting Called for by Portugal and organized by Otto von Bismarck, first Chancellor of Germany, its outcome, the General Act of the Berlin Conference, can be seen as the formalization of the Black Chattelization Wars in regards to the West and Central Afrikan sections of the war. The conference ushered in a period of heightened colonial activity by European powers, while simultaneously eliminating most existing forms of Afrikan autonomy and self-governance. Previously, Europeans dealt with kingdoms on the continent of Afrika from bases and fortresses on coast. After, the the General Act was ratified, most European nations worked to move into the continent.

Modern Euro-Afrikan relations

After the Second World War people in Afrika wanted change. Only Egypt, Liberia and Ethiopia were independent at that point.

In Southern Afrika, European settlers wanted to cut the ties with Britain and Portugal, but retain white minority rule, excluding the indigenous Afrikan population. The fighting resulting from this was violent and destructive to the infrastructure of the countries involved and their independent neighbours. Burdened by apartheid for decades, South Africans were the last people on the continent to attain majority rule. Meanwhile the Cold War conflict between America and the Soviet Union distorted politics at a regional level particularly in Angola and other southern countries.

Attaining economic independence proved harder than gaining political independence. With being free from colonialism, a new form dubbed neocolonialism by Osagyfo Kwame Nkrumah came into existence.

Use of Christianity in the war

Christianity and the BCW are often closely associated because Catholicism and Protestantism were the religions of the European colonial powers[10] and acted in many ways as the "religious arm" of those powers.[11] According to Edward Andrews, Christian missionaries were initially portrayed as "visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery". However, by the time the colonial era drew to a close in the last half of the twentieth century, missionaries became viewed as "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them",[12] colonialism's "agent, scribe and moral alibi."[13]

Christianity is targeted by critics of colonialism because the tenets of the religion were used to justify the actions of the colonists.[14] For example, Toyin Falola asserts that there were some missionaries who believed that "the agenda of colonialism in Africa was similar to that of Christianity".[15] Falola cites Jan H. Boer of the Sudan United Mission as saying, "Colonialism is a form of imperialism based on a divine mandate and designed to bring liberation - spiritual, cultural, economic and political - by sharing the blessings of the Christ-inspired civilization of the West with a people suffering under satanic oppression, ignorance and disease, effected by a combination of political, economic and religious forces that cooperate under a regime seeking the benefit of both ruler and ruled."[15]

Edward Andrews writes:

Historians have traditionally looked at Christian missionaries in one of two ways. The first church historians to catalogue missionary history provided hagiographic descriptions of their trials, successes, and sometimes even martyrdom. Missionaries were thus visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, an era marked by civil rights movements, anti-colonialism, and growing secularization, missionaries were viewed quite differently. Instead of godly martyrs, historians now described missionaries as arrogant and rapacious imperialists. Christianity became not a saving grace but a monolithic and aggressive force that missionaries imposed upon defiant natives. Indeed, missionaries were now understood as important agents in the ever-expanding nation-state, or "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them."[citation needed]

According to Jake Meador, "some Christians have tried to make sense of post-colonial Christianity by renouncing practically everything about the Christianity of the colonizers. They reason that if the colonialists’ understanding of Christianity could be used to justify rape, murder, theft, and empire then their understanding of Christianity is completely wrong. "[16]

According to Lamin Sanneh, "(m)uch of the standard Western scholarship on Christian missions proceeds by looking at the motives of individual missionaries and concludes by faulting the entire missionary enterprise as being part of the machinery of Western cultural imperialism." As an alternative to this view, Sanneh presents a different perspective arguing that "missions in the modern era has been far more, and far less, than the argument about motives customarily portrays."[17]

Michael Wood asserts that the indigenous peoples were not considered to be human beings and that the colonisers was shaped by "centuries of Ethnocentrism, and Christian monotheism, which espoused one truth, one time and version of reality."[18]

Proxy internal wars

sources

↑Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named Mannix_1962_Introduction-1.E2.80.935

↑John Henrik Clarke, Slave Trade and Slavery (New York: Holt McDougal, 1970), ISBN 9780030841545 , p. 12. "The slave trade prospered, and Africans continued to be poured into the New World. Figures on the subject vary, but it has been estimated that during the years of the African slave trade, Africa lost from 60 to 100 Million people."

↑"African Holocaust How Many". African Holocaust Society. Retrieved 2007-01-04. While traditional studies often focus on official French and British records of how many Africans arrived in the New World, these studies neglect to include the death from raids, the fatalities on board the ships, deaths caused by European diseases, the victims from the consequences of enslavement, and trauma of refugees displaced by slaving activities. The number of arrivals also neglects the volume of Africans who arrived via pirates, who for obvious reasons, wouldn't have kept records.

↑Melvin E. Page, Penny M. Sonnenburg (2003). Colonialism: an international, social, cultural, and political encyclopedia, Volume 1. ABC-CLIO. p. 496. Of all religions, Christianity has been most associated with colonialism because several of its forms (Catholicism and Protestantism) were the religions of the European powers engaged in colonial enterprise on a global scale.

↑Bevans, Steven. "Christian Complicity in Colonialism/ Globalism"(PDF). Retrieved 2010-11-17. The modern missionary era was in many ways the ‘religious arm’ of colonialism, whether Portuguese and Spanish colonialism in the sixteenth Century, or British, French, German, Belgian or American colonialism in the nineteenth. This was not all bad — oftentimes missionaries were heroic defenders of the rights of indigenous peoples

↑Andrews, Edward (2010). "Christian Missions and Colonial Empires Reconsidered: A Black Evangelist in West Africa, 1766–1816". Journal of Church & State51 (4): 663–691. doi:10.1093/jcs/csp090. Historians have traditionally looked at Christian missionaries in one of two ways. The first church historians to catalogue missionary history provided hagiographic descriptions of their trials, successes, and sometimes even martyrdom. Missionaries were thus visible saints, exemplars of ideal piety in a sea of persistent savagery. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, an era marked by civil rights movements, anti-colonialism, and growing secularization, missionaries were viewed quite differently. Instead of godly martyrs, historians now described missionaries as arrogant and rapacious imperialists. Christianity became not a saving grace but a monolithic and aggressive force that missionaries imposed upon defiant natives. Indeed, missionaries were now understood as important agents in the ever-expanding nation-state, or "ideological shock troops for colonial invasion whose zealotry blinded them.

↑Meador, Jake. "Cosmetic Christianity and the Problem of Colonialism – Responding to Brian McLaren". Retrieved 2010-11-17. According to Jake Meador, "some Christians have tried to make sense of post-colonial Christianity by renouncing practically everything about the Christianity of the colonizers. They reason that if the colonialists’ understanding of Christianity could be used to justify rape, murder, theft, and empire then their understanding of Christianity is completely wrong.